Irreal

I don’t have anything interesting to say today so here’s some amusing Emacs quotes for your entertainment. I especially like Sean McGrathi’s.

Mike Zamansky has posted the latest video in his Using Emacs series. This time it’s about using shell and eshell from within Emacs. Like Zamansky, I’m an old time command line user—I even used the MKS toolkit—and before Emacs I did almost all my work directly in the shell. Since coming to Emacs, I’ve tried to train myself to use the shell from within Emacs. I had only partial success until I started using eshell.

While there are still some gotchas with eshell, it mostly works fine and, indeed, is often superior to a plain shell. Most of the problems involve things like cursor addressing but even there eshell can do the right thing by running the application in a term buffer. See this post from October for the details.

As Zamansky notes in his video, an advantage of eshell is that you can run Emacs command directly from the “command line.” There are other advantages as well. Try cding into a remote machine as Zamansky demonstrates and you’ll be convinced. Mickey, of course, has all the details in his excellent Mastering Eshell article. If you’re an eshell user, or would like to become one, you MUST read his article. I reread it periodically and I always learn something new.

Zamansky’s video is 8 and a half minutes so it’s perfect for a coffee break.

Chen Bin posted some nice Elisp on how to make flyspell at little more useful when dealing with Web-mode buffers. The problem is that many tag elements fail the spell check and you get a lot of spurious misspelling warnings.

Chen’s code fixes this so that only appropriate parts of the HTML are checked. He also shows how to extend this to Javascipt as a way of pointing to ways of extending his methods to other modes. If you do a lot of work in Web-mode or you’re looking for a way of solving the same problem in some other mode, take a look at Chen’s code.

Regular readers know that I’m fond of seeing other people’s workflows, especially those workflows centered around Emacs. Torstein Johansen has an interesting post on his workflow.

Johansen describes his hardware and OS environment (a Thinkpad with 2 external screens running Debian) and then his most used software. Like me, he mostly lives in either his browser or Emacs. He has one speed key to bring up a terminal but everything else is either started at boot time or started from the terminal as needed. I like the basic minimalism of his setup. The usual full set of applications are available for use when needed but his workflow and setup are centered around Emacs and the browser. Of course, he also has a virtual screen for chat applications and a music player, which he controls with shortcut keys.

If you, too, enjoy seeing how others get their work done, take a look at Johansen’s post. In particular, if you’re running Linux you may like his ideas about key shortcuts.